1. Technical Field
Present invention embodiments relate to data access, and more specifically, to performing a data access operation with dynamic linking and access of data within plural data sources.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
A Web or mobile device application accesses data of an enterprise system in order to be applied to a real business or other scenario. For example, a business application developer may create an application that tracks employee activities. The application may define an activity collection of data records within an initial data source with various properties or attributes (e.g., Type, Status, Product Family, Location, Employee, Description, Checkpoint, Alliance Owner, Activity Date, etc.). The Employee property may include a string comprising first and last names. An employees collection of data records may be stored in a registry of employees or other data source external of the initial data source. The employees collection of data records includes various properties or attributes to represent employee profiles (e.g., first and last names, electronic mail (e-mail) address, mobile telephone number, etc.).
In order for the application to track employee activities, employee profile information from the external data source is required (e.g., e-mail, mobile telephone number, etc.) to drive notifications. Since the activity and employee collections are separate, the application is required to join these collections directly in order to render information and trigger notifications. Relational databases enable joining of information from database tables by employing hard foreign keys to link data between the database tables and a special join mechanism to merge data from those database tables. However, a business or other application may access data lacking structured database schemas, and require a linking scheme for the data with greater flexibility.